Home cinema 3D (or just tick off theatergoers)

After a visit to the local theater and discovering the use of IR 3D glasses (for films such as Avatar), the team over at Furrtek wondered how they worked, and more importantly, how the glasses could be manipulated to tick off audience members. While the original intentions seem a bit childish, they did mention that their final setup could also be used for a home cinema with IR 3D glasses.

Onto the good stuff: the glasses receive IR light pulses timed with the movie to black out the appropriate eye with the appropriate frame and producing a 3D effect. With the use of IR Investigator the team grabbed said timings; it was then simply a matter of building their own IR projector, and bringing it back to the theater to annoy the crowd setting it up for their 3D home cinema.

This is not how a lot of 3d theaters work. The ones I’ve been in use polarized lenses, and two polarized images on the screen at once so each eye only sees the image it’s supposed to. There are theaters giving out 3d shutter glasses? That’s awesome.

I read this site everyday and here people whinning about how “thats obnoxious” or your a jerk or many others….get over it the whole point of this site is to be creative i say have fun with what you create unless it does physical harm to someone

If I paid for my family of four to see Avatar, costing at least $50 for tix alone, and some punk wants to screw with our day out, he’s gonna have a problem. Changing the TV at the bar is one thing, wasting my money is another.

anon says “I read this site everyday and here people whinning about how “thats obnoxious” or your a jerk or many others….get over it the whole point of this site is to be creative i say have fun with what you create unless it does physical harm to someone”

How about I come to your house and cut the electricity, phone, and water off for a laugh. To make it creative, I’ll do it with an autonomous robot. Nobody is physically harmed, so I trust you’ll take it in good humor.

Yea, this is pretty weak. There would seem to be a lot of holes with this technique anyway.

Also, avatar (and many movies like it) use polarized glasses the two lenses where one is polarized for the vertical and one for the horizontal. The light going out onto the screen is also polarized such that there will essentially two images displayed on the screen where one image gets blocked out for each eye.

@David S: They’re not horizontally and vertically polarised, they use circular polarisers.

You can test this by wearing a pair of glasses and looking at another pair (both facing same direction) and rotating the glasses you will notice that none of the polarisers goes dark (test for one eye closed each time). Then try doing this with the glasses the other way around, you will notice at 90 degrees rotation that when you close an eye one of glasses turns black (one black for each eye)

Uh, circular polarisers ? You’re the one running around in circles. David is right. And if you think why 2 lenses cancel each other out when they’re rotated 90 degrees, you’ll understand why he’s right. At least, I hope you do…

@meh: RealD certainly uses circular polarisers. Try looking at an LCD monitor (which uses linear polarisation) through RealD glasses and you’ll see that at whichever angle you hold them at you can still see through them. Note that you can also tilt your head in the cinema and not see a double image, as you would with linear polarisers.

Ya, there’s no way that they are shutter glasses, unless there are different kinds. I have nVidia’s 3d shutter glasses that I use for 3d gaming and they cost me $160. Of course they did come with an IR sencor to though, but still.

Agreed with Ben Ryves.
I worked at a place that was ramping up production of it’s 3D capable digital cinima projectors.(Maybe for Avatar :S either way it was crazy, we went from 100 something a month to 4-5 hundred) I read as many technical documents on it as I could. The projectors we built had circular polarizers.

I’d say using this is clearly illegal because it interferes with a business willfully and I’m sure there are laws for that for centuries already, and I hope the cops caps the ones doing this kind of stuff, not deadly of course, and they should be easy to spot so easy to catch.

Ya, there’s no way that they are shutter glasses, unless there are different kinds. I have nVidia’s 3d shutter glasses that I use for 3d gaming and they cost me $160. Of course they did come with an IR sencor to though, but still. ya okey

Man, shutter glasses for 3D at a theater seems weird, thought it was cheaper just to put the circular polarizer in front of the projector and give out those circular polarization glasses like Real3D uses.

Polarized lenses for stereo vision movies are circularly polarized, not linearly. The same eye between two pairs does not dim no matter how you rotate it. However one eye against an opposite eye between pairs /will/ dim.

All this toy does is to black out one eye to cancel the stereo effect. Sure it makes it less enjoyable/not as intended, but you do not miss any part of the movie unless its stereo-ness was part of the plot…

Even better use for this technology – move houses can double the number of screens just by projecting two movies at once on each screen. (The glasses you get determine which movie you see.)

If you want to see a chick flick and your date wants to see an action movie – no problem.
Screenings of movies about smurfs, barney or other toddler brain-rot could allow the parent to see something else.

Of course one would have to wear headphones to get the soundtrack – but that could be broadcast to your bluetooth headset (seems like everyone has those permanently implanted nowadays.)